Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
Severus with great labor and charge terrified the Caledonians; but he did not subdue them. He neglected those easy and assured means of subjection which the nature of that part of Britain affords to a power master of the sea, by the bays, friths, and lakes with which it is everywhere pierced, and in some places almost cut through.
But even their descendants in England had not kept pace, either in the arts of navigation or in thirst for adventure, with their distant relatives, who remained two centuries later among the friths and rocks of Scandinavia. The first appearance of these invaders on the Irish and British coasts occurred in 794.
The limits of their first territory cannot be exactly laid down; but it soon spread north into Rosshire, and east into the present county of Perth. It was a land of stormy friths and fissured headlands, of deep defiles and snowy summits. "'Tis a far cry to Lough Awe," is still a lowland proverb, and Lough Awe was in the very heart of that old Irish settlement.
Thus riding they had tidings of an host of the Burg of the Four Friths who were resting in a valley hard by with a great train of captives and beasts and other spoil: for they had been raising the fray against the Wheat-wearers, and had slain many carles there, and were bringing home to the Burg many young women and women-children, after their custom.
The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved.
Within a while they all slacked somewhat, and presently did but walk, though swiftly, through the paths of the thicket, which Ralph deemed full surely was part of that side of the Wood Perilous that lay south of the Burg of the Four Friths. And now Roger joined himself to him, and spake to him aloud and said: "So, fair master, thou art out of the peril of death for this bout."
Having taken these precautions for securing his rear, he advanced northwards, and, penetrating into Caledonia as far as the river Tay, he there built a prætentura, or line of forts, between the two friths, which are in that place no more than twenty miles asunder. The enemy, says Tacitus, was removed as it were into another island.
To the Vikings of Norway the fertile Island with which they were now so familiar, whose woods were bent with the autumnal load of acorns, mast, and nuts, and filled with numerous herds of swine their favourite food whose pleasant meadows were well stored with beeves and oxen, whose winter was often as mild as their northern summer, and whose waters were as fruitful in fish as their own Lofoden friths; to these men, this was a prize worth fighting for; and for it they fought long and desperately.
He himself always chose the ground for encamping: the salt marshes, friths, and woods he himself always first examined, and to the enemies all the while allowed not a moment's quiet or recess, but was ever distressing them with sudden incursions and ravages.
Before his departure, the prudent general had provided for security as well as for dominion. He had observed, that the island is almost divided into two unequal parts by the opposite gulfs, or, as they are now called, the Friths of Scotland.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking